Saturday, August 8, 2015

Four Awesome Things About Being A Filipino Martial Artist

Being an extrovert, I've always been the type of person who likes standing out from the crowd. I've had funky hair colors, unusual haircuts, and enjoy flashy jewelry.

LOOK AT ME!!

When it comes to the local martial arts scene, we FMA players tend to stand out. Our uniforms tend to be brighter (and of a different cut - when we wear them at all), many of us wear our belts the Modern Arnis way (knot on the right hip), and we always have our sticks with us at a minimum.

Other martial artists - after they realize that it's a thing - tend to ask a lot of questions about who we are, and what we do. It's like being a person with a heavy English accent (any kind or any region) living in the United States - we find it glamorous and interesting and we love to listen to that person talk.

It's Versatile

The basic FMA training methodology has students learning to fight with a weapon first, then progressing to the empty hand. It involves a lot of drills that gives a person a lot of repetitions, often with both your strong hand and your weapons. Our sticks are often taught as stand-ins for other weapons (like a machete), we typically study more than one length of weapons, usually a knife, and we often study using weapons in both hands as well as just one hand.

This leaves us with the ability to be pretty flexible when it comes to using other weapons, (such as many of the Japanese or Okinawan weapons) as well as being able to find and use weapons of opportunity we'd find around us (like pens, or broom handles or what have you).

It's not that we'd use a weapon - such as a tonfa or sai - from another tradition AS that tradition would. It means that we can use our own methodology and adapt that weapon to what we already know very quickly. I can do Arnis with Okinawan weapons - I have, many times, even before I started studying them.

Combine that with the empty hand training - I'd say it makes us pretty darn flexible as martial artists go.

We tend to have a "Meritocracy"

I wrote that lineage in the FMA's can be a tricky business. But the flip side of that, is that it means a little less who you studied with or under in our culture.

That is, we tend to judge each other not by who our teachers are, but by our own individual merit. Ultimately, it doesn't matter much if I studied with one of the most prestigious teachers of my art; what matters is how I play my art myself.

In this, we're a lot like the combat sports, where your win/loss record is more important vs. who your coach is.

This also makes us a little more egalitarian, which I think will make us more attractive to people in the West over time. I prefer a more democratic environment, so that suits me really well.

The FMA's Are the "Art of Choice" for Hollywood Fight Scenes

We are still waiting for our "Bloodsport" or "Enter the Dragon" or "Karate Kid" (the real one - the Ralph Macchio one) - the movie or TV show that will make the Filipino Martial Arts known and more in demand with folks looking to try the martial arts.

But over the past ten years or so, Hollywood fight scenes have borrowed more and more from the Filipino Martial Arts. From the "Bourne" movies, to the "Arrow" television show, to the film "I, Frankenstein", to "Mission Impossible"... more and more, anything weapons-based on film is coming from the FMA tradition.